Many of those who resigned on Friday believe that Hughes and Vidra now intend to turn TNR into a click-focused digital media company, at the expense of the magazine’s strong editorial traditions and venerable brand, according to sources who attended the gathering at Foer’s house.

“The narrative you’re going to see Chris and Guy put out there is that I and the rest of my colleagues who quit today were dinosaurs, who think that the Internet is scary and that Buzzfeed is a slur. Don’t believe them,” Julia Ioffe, one of the resigning senior editors, wrote in a Facebook post. “The staff at TNR has always been faithful to the magazine’s founding mission to experiment, and nowhere have I been so encouraged to do so. There was no opposition in the editorial ranks to expanding TNR’s web presence, to innovating digitally. Many were even board for going monthly. We’re not afraid of change. We have always embraced it.”

Here’s the masthead, pre-resignation. Of the twelve senior editors, only Brian Beutler, Evgeny Morozov, and Rebecca Traister remain. Both executive editors are gone. The digital media editor is gone, but most of the editors who actually put out the magazine seem to still be in place. (“Senior editor” is a title that usually means someone in the first rank of staff writers, though depending on the culture and structure of the magazine, it could also involve some editing).

Given the state of the media profession today, it takes real moral courage to resign a journalism job on principle. Contributing editors aren’t paid much, if at all, but senior editors and other staffers depended on their TNR paycheck to pay bills. And they gave that up as a matter of principle, even though they live in one of the most expensive cities in the country, and have dim immediate prospects for finding a new job in this declining industry. These men and women have my deep respect.

I don’t judge those who have remained behind, precisely because it is so difficult to find a job elsewhere. I expect at least some of them will resign later, if they can put together a plan for supporting themselves after they quit. Maybe others will remain, not because they necessarily agree with the Hughes/Vidra vision for the magazine, but because they need that job. How Gabriel Snyder, the incoming editor, manages to put out a magazine with such a traumatized staff is beyond me. What’s more, all of these writers are well networked in Washington media and political circles. The Hughes TNR is going to be radioactive. I think Gabriel Snyder is walking into one of the worst jobs in elite journalism. It’s like being appointed manager of a hotel in Sarajevo right after the shooting stopped.

And isn’t there a place for just that – for a group of writers and thinkers to put out a publication that doesn’t seek to maximize pageviews or generate profits, but which dares to believe it has something to say, a point of view to fight over, and just gets on with it and hopes for the best? That was the formula we followed in the decade I worked there as editor and before. If you build it, they will come … and when I left it, we had over 100,000 subscribers. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t a million, or even 105,000. They were the right 100,000 – and built a shared community of ideas and a heritage to fight over. That’s what’s missing in this era of pageviews and clickbait and sponsored content: a self-confident team that, at some level, doesn’t give a shit what others or even readers believe, as long as the debate itself is rigorous, fair, open and reasoned. I remember Michael Lewis throwing back his head and giving that barking laugh of his as he marveled: ‘The is the first magazine I’ve ever been a part of that never asks what its readers want.” Where is that kind of publication now?

Yes, the era in which a handful of magazines were the effective gate-keepers for an entire national conversation is gone – and that is a good thing for the discourse and for the democracy. But only if what TNR did can be replicated in the new era.

More, on how the new media start-ups, for all that’s good about them, don’t do what old media warhorses like TNR did:

Do you get any sense from Vox that its editors are actually struggling to figure out the world, that there are battle-lines over policy and politics, that high culture and low culture are critical complements to a nothing-but-politics-and-policy view of the world? Say what you like about Marty Peretz – but there was more diversity of thought in one issue of TNR than there has been in one year of Vox. That’s what I’ll miss. Along with the contrarian refusal to go along with the latest left-liberal fad, or to cover for Democrats in office, for fear of giving “the other side” ammunition.

Amen to all that. But here are three related points that are hard for people like Andrew and me (and you, maybe) to take:

1. There is no way to be that kind of magazine today and make money. Maybe there never was. Some rich guy owner, or collection of rich guys (donors), are going to have to subsidize these magazines. You have to hope for a wealthy owner, or wealthy donors, who see themselves as stewards of certain principles, which includes encouraging debate and discussion — I mean, what Andrew Sullivan calls “struggling to figure out the world,” as distinct from having the world all figured out, and telling it what to think about itself.

If I won the Powerball, I would sink a fortune into The American Conservative, but I would not want it to be a mouthpiece for my views, nor would I want it to become a magazine that lays down a party line. I would be pleased to spend my fortune making it into a lively magazine that sees the world generally from the perspective of the traditionalist right (as opposed to the neoconservative right), with some libertarian leanings as well. I’m not much of a libertarian, as you know, but some of the most interesting and important thinking is coming from libertarians. My point is simply that “struggling to figure out the world” is a vital mission, one worth supporting even if some of the answers the strugglers come up with are wrong. I would not want to fund a magazine that gives pre-fabricated conservative answers to the world’s problems; I would want to fund a magazine that asks conservative questions, and thinks about them in a conservative way.

2. Because we are mostly a bunch of romantics, journalists and writers have a huge blind spot to the money side of running publications. Andrew is right: not having to care what your readers thought about you gives writers and editors a lot of freedom, and they can use it in admirable ways. But if that’s your attitude, you had better have a sugar daddy to subsidize your losses. Andrew is running a very lean operation, and so far he seems to be doing well. But his is an opinion and aggregation site, and that’s something that can be done cheaply. His site, like this blog, is a free rider on the investment other media outlets make in reporting and in-depth essays. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing (and by the way, I’m a paid subscriber of Andrew’s site), but I am saying that we writers look down on the bean-counter side of running publications, as if it contaminated our sacred labors. The money to pay the salaries of writers and editors doesn’t come from a pot of leprechaun gold.

3. We also tend to ideologize these matters in a way that’s unhelpful to clear thinking. When I was at the Dallas Morning News in the past decade, the few conservatives at the paper were often astonished by how the newsroom, in what it chose to cover and the way it chose to cover it, seemed to go out of its way to offend the kind of people who actually subscribed to the paper (older north Dallas and Collin County suburban Republicans, mostly). I would argue, in a friendly way, with liberal colleagues over this, but all the time I would be thinking, “If we empathized more with our actual customers, and reported more on the things that concern them, and were more fair and representative to their views, we wouldn’t be losing so many subscribers.”

As the decade wore on, though, I came to disbelieve that diagnosis. Our subscription losses were on par with the subscription losses of most other newspapers in the US. You could say that the DMN was too liberal for Dallas, and you could make a good case for that. But could you say that the Boston Globe, which also suffered steep circulation declines, was too liberal for Boston? The shift away from print media is not mostly about ideology, though a lot of people like to think so.

So when people like Freddie de Boer, a true leftist, sneer from a left-wing perspective at the demise of TNR, I understand where he’s coming from and don’t begrudge him his opinion. But I think he shouldn’t be quite so confident, because the same dynamic that’s brought TNR down threatens all small magazines of opinion in this country. I would be surprised if any of us could pay our bills on subscriptions and ad sales alone. We depend on the generosity of donors — many of them wealthy and public-spirited — who believe that the work we do is important, even if it is not money-making.

Somebody said yesterday that TNR doesn’t need a better business model, it needs a better owner. Yes, exactly. I don’t know how many rich people are willing to subsidize a money-losing journalistic operation out of principle and for the common good, but we sure need to find them.

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34 Responses to The Catos of Old Media

What exactly is the “venerable brand” that The New Republic represents? Pushing America into the First World War? Glossing over the facts in the 1930s about the charnel house that was Soviet Russia? Pushing us into another world war in 1940-41 and smearing isolationist patriots? Joining Truman’s mendacious Cold War bandwagon? Bellyaching about the unfathomable horrors of McCarthyism? Or nonstop support for the terrorist Zionist state? Yes, quite a “brand” this rag has.

The thing about The New Republic and a number of other legacy magazines is that they seem to be absolutely incapable of revisiting past mistakes. They seem unable to learn from the bad positions they’ve taken. Is there really much difference between something you read in TNR 10 years ago and today? The same thing applies to a lot of other publications as well.

At any rate, I guess Starbucks will be getting some more baristas real soon now.

The old WASP elite was actually good at this thing. They went to schools and taught values amongst themselves that valued principles over money often. They often had a wide, snobbish, anti-egalitarian streak but often this was combined with a commitment to some form of public service. It was almost nobles oblige like. With their power and influence dying off I can’t help but wonder what have we lost and what will we continue to lose? Will people continue to support in a big way private but yet serving a public good institutions?

“Many of those who resigned on Friday believe that Hughes and Vidra now intend to turn TNR into a click-focused digital media company, at the expense of the magazine’s strong editorial traditions and venerable brand”

Strange that no one is sticking around to find out if that is actually the case. Is it already clear that the new owners plan to uproot the whole thing, or are they making assumptions? Of course, firing the old editors is a big signal, but still.

The assumption seem to be that it is about to become Buzzfeed. Is there any proof of that? None of these people wanted to stick around and help shepherd the old brand into the new world?

What’s amazing to me is how many of the names on the resignation list I recognize and respect, even though I’ve never subscribed to The New Republic or almost any other magazine of a similar type. Those are some names to conjure by in my personal intellectual ecology.

Maybe I know them because I read Rod and Andrew Sullivan and Prufrock and the First Things blog, but it’s not because I directly read The New Republic. Maybe that makes me part of the problem: however much I’ve enjoyed their writing, so far as I know I’ve never done anything that would help any of those writers get paid.

You should have saved “How Privilege Dies” as a title for one of these posts about TNR. Inside the Beltway journalists with LOTS of American and Iraqi blood on their hands (like Leon Wieseltier) get little sympathy from me for losing their gilded sinecures.

Honestly, I think of TNR, ideologically, as kind of the anti-TAC. TAC is anti-interventionist and traditionalist. TNR’s most prominent interventions in my adult life have been in favor of the Iraq War, and in giving Andrew Sullivan a platform for his SSM arguments. Why would any kind of paleocon mourn the passing of such a magazine?
Maybe it had nice culture reviews, and maybe these guys were great editors or personal friends, but TNR in my adult life (i.e., under Peretz and Hughes) has, as its primary accomplishments, creating exactly the world that TAC rails against.

(Second the Jacobin recommendation, btw. They’re leftists with principles, rather than just neocon creeps.)

A further thought: TNR has been a cheerleader for neoliberal capitalism for a very long time now. That laissez faire creative destruction has hit them (instead of just the rest of them), doesn’t bother me in the least. Would that the establishment sycophants at WaPo, NY Times, and Vox could be hoisted on their own neoliberal petards, too.

The New Republic lost all credibility with the Stephen Glass affair. For all its prestige, NR printed blatantly false articles that couldn’t pass a smell test by any random informed citizen. It makes you wonder how many other lies they’ve printed over their storied history. Just remember it took a half-assed digital publication to unmask this blatant fraud yet Chuck Lane gets credit for firing Glass and making the spoiled editors face up to what they had enabled.

If this crew built a car it would explode when started while killing and maiming those within sight.

Every single one of those resigning would have no difficulty at all in referring to Republicans, Conservatives, and Evangelicals as racists, homophobes, nativists, anti-semites, dog-whistlers, anti-immigrant, know-nothings, Koch-funded, haters. And they’re supposed to be principled because the owner wants to make more money rather than subsidize a bunch of liberal arts majors. Spare me your crocodile tears, please.

There’s no principles here – just a bunch of pampered foodies terrified that they’ll not be able to shop at Whole Foods or Dean and Deluca for a few days.

“And isn’t there a place for just that – for a group of writers and thinkers to put out a publication that doesn’t seek to maximize pageviews or generate profits, but which dares to believe it has something to say, a point of view to fight over, and just gets on with it and hopes for the best?”

The New Yorker?

I’m sympathetic to Chris Hughes. He’s a young, ambitious guy who doesn’t just want to be an ATM machine to a dying magazine. I love it how so many people are discounting his wealth as winning the lottery. Hughes played an important role at Facebook and deserves some respect on how to run a business. Because that’s what ultimately the TNR is. It’s a business, not a religion or a college.

This is probably an unpopular viewpoint, but I’m actually going to withhold judgment on the new TNR until it comes out and I actually read it. I know!

The idea that the only decent liberal writers and thinkers out there are the people who were on staff at TNR and left, is part of the problem with these people in the first place. The sense of intellectual entitlement is so thick, it makes their writings hard to take. I used to be a TNR subscriber years ago, but eventually I just couldn’t stand reading the magazine. It’s not just the neocon views, it’s the attitude. The preciousness. Franklin Foer most recently and especially, but it bled into the whole staff. Occasionally I would surf over there to see if anything had changed, but it never did. Pretty insufferable, really. So I really do greet this much more warmly than most. At least there’s a chance that something decent will come of this. Because TNR really did need to change mightily, and a bloodbath is probably the only way it could have. And so I’ll withhold judgment until the new TNR comes out. I certainly won’t lament the passing of the old TNR and its staff. Well, some of them. Ryan Lizza will be missed. But in general, I’m hoping that whole smug entitled crowd gets its comeupance, and the new TNR does well on all levels.

Sullivan has done something pretty amazing, which is make a living off an independent site funded entirely from subscribers. But it’s important to remember he came up the ranks through traditional media outlets. I started reading him because he was on The Atlantic and they had a strong web presence which put him in my radar. The Atlantic and Daily Beast gave him a platform for a readership that was willing to support his independence.

No aspiring opinion writer or blogger can do that without getting a platform first. I discovered Dreher and TAC through Daily Dish links. Both writers and readers need institutions/publications/websites that can be relied on to help direct them to good voices and writers. Anyone can write a blog, but not everyone is worth reading. A writer who is worth reading needs an institution to promote their voice and get it out to as wide a readership as possible. Yes, I can see an individual with their own blog becoming widely read. But that seems like a pretty uphill struggle because you have to find a way to put your work in front of people who might want to read it.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but I do think that institutions like The Atlantic, like TAC remain vital because they help introduce readers like me to voices we otherwise wouldn’t know to look for.

It’s hard to lament the loss of TNR or other legacy outfits when you’ve grown up post-2000 on free, highly intelligent and thoughtful stuff from the likes of e.g. Scott Alexander.

There’s a generation of writers out there who never thought they’d make a living writing anyway. Software engineers, nurses and copywriters have blogs, alot of it very thoughtful stuff. They make a little scratch from writing if they’re prolific, but it doesn’t pay the bills.

Maybe those who attend an Ivy League and pay out the nose for a mainstream media career track are the ones who have it all wrong…

I don’t see this as a narrow matter involving a supposedly little magazine. This is an episode signaling something significant about intellectual life in America.

Of course the finances of small opinion/intellectual magazine are precarious; that’s the way it’s always been. The key issue is something else: the need for seriously minded Americans to appreciate the life of the mind and the threat to it from present-day political hysteria and the appalling shallowness of influential people like the current TNR owner.

If you look at the contributions made by TNR over the decades, many of them were significant; we’re not talking about a mere curiosity such as the now-antique and somewhat quaint debates among New York intellectual leftists in Partisan Review in the 1930s. TNR contributed significantly to intellectual debates in the 1980s and ’90s. At times it challenged liberal assumptions even as the magazine remained firmly in the left-of-center camp. Wieseltier oversaw a consistently serious-minded “back of the book” section — years of major reviews and essays on a wealth of substantive cultural, historical, and artistic topics. Wieseltier, agree with him or not, stands as a pre-eminent essayist. I well remember fantastically done pieces in the ’80s that talked about the courageous ways that men and women in Eastern Europe were struggling to push back against the communist regimes. Those accounts were inspiring.

That is a major part of 20th-century American intellectual history, history that provides the main context for understanding the significance of what occurred this week. Because in contrast to that heritage of intellectual seriousness and commitment … look what the current owner, an apologetically unserious 30-year-old Facebook co-founder, has chosen to do with the magazine.

He could have used his fortune to independently create the Gawker-style monstrosity he intends. That would been a mere indulgence — foolish, not surprisingly shallow and sensationalist, but not that significant. Just one more eruption of egoism by one more 21st-century tech mogul.

Instead, what did he do? He purchased TNR and then: remained pointedly ignorant, even dismissive of its heritage; displayed an utter lack of intellectual seriousness and regard for the life of the mind; hired editors from Buzzfeed and Gawker, of all things, to provide the “vision”; and then gutted the magazine, dismissing Foer without the slightest professionalism or decency.

A supposed dinosaur like Wieseltier has made greater contributions to public discussion and the life of the mind that this little TNR owner and his little gang of sensationalists will make over the next three decades (assuming their new TNR platform even survives that long).

Tech moguls like this TNR owner are in the ascendant. They’re making choices with enormous ramifications for American life. Some decisions bode well for the future. The decisions made at TNR bode ill for journalism and intellectual life in America, just as the avalanche today of reader comments and tweets cheering on the demise of TNR’s traditionalist “dinosaurs” shows where people’s priorities now lie.

Yes, exactly. I don’t know how many rich people are willing to subsidize a money-losing journalistic operation out of principle and for the common good, but we sure need to find them.

Maybe we should just tax the rich people and put some of the money into subsidizing money-losing journalistic operations out of principle and for the common good. Why let what some rich person thinks is good, rule?

What that owner of TNR has done would be like the movie industry exiling Martin Scorcese, Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne, and Werner Herzog — serious auteurs who care about art — and holding up Michael Bay and Tom Six (The Human Centipede) as the central role models for praiseworthy directors, with tweets and online commenters mocking the outdated “dinosaurs” and hailing the brave new age.

TNR is not the entire magazine industry, it’s one little pretentious publication among thousands. These people can surely find work elsewhere, given how important and crucial they imagine themselves to be. Undoubtedly many people will pay good money just to be associated with such greatness. The bidding war now begins.

“Maybe we should just tax the rich people and put some of the money into subsidizing money-losing journalistic operations out of principle and for the common good. Why let what some rich person thinks is good, rule?”

Don’t we already do this with NPR, CPB, etc?

Bart, I agree with you about the old line WASPs. I know a good many members of one of this area’s old money families. They used to invest in this kind of thing, but two things have changed: (1) newer generations eschew this sort of thing – they’re no different from newspaper subscribers who cancel, and (2) as one patriarch put it “Nobody has any integrity or loyalty anymore.”

I register that I haven’t read an issue of TNR since the early ’90s. I didn’t like or trust what I read there. There was a smell, one that people of normal sensibility associate with decadence, untruth, propaganda.

I take Rod’s general point about small, influential publications, but in the end TNR wasn’t about small publications, writer communities, quality of thought. It had a poisonous agenda – more than one, actually – that to the extent it was realized damaged the country. Save the Stanley Kauffmann stuff if you like, but burn the rest. Harper’s was more interesting and often right.

So if it’s gone, good, and I hope it doesn’t return as a “digital media company” or any other vampirical manifestation. Here’s hoping that this episode is (further) evidence of intellectual rejection of what TNR stood for and a turning point in educated taste.

‘… “struggling to figure out the world” is a vital mission, one worth supporting even if some of the answers the strugglers come up with are wrong.’—

An adequate description of Conservatism and Liberalism before they degenerated into the Self-righteous Radical Right and the Strident Loony Left. (You recall, if you are old enough, back when Truth mattered, and manners came before partei.)

You should read the MondoWeiss take on the situation. They point out that TNR, at its most influential, was mostly bad — giving a platform and support to a host of neocons, warmongers, and liberal hawks. Not to mention Betsy McConoughey and Charles Murray circa “Bell Curve”.

Overall, a good literary section in back doesn’t make up for all that evil counsel.

The problem I had with TNR wasn’t that they were “outdated.” It was that, when it mattered most in their modern history (on Iraq) they were both smugly wrong and perniciously influential. They have been a force for making the world worse on multiple issues.

Rod’s commentary raises a fascinating general question. With a little luck, it will start to get some currency. The question is: if public intellectuals perform a public service of sorts – and most of the readers of this comment section seem to me likely to agree that they do, whatever their opinion of TNR’s character and historical influence – then what sort of financial and institutional arrangements will make it possible for the work public intellectuals do to persist in an era without gate-keepers? William F. Buckley bankrolled NR not just because he could, but because it mattered, a lot, and it mattered to a lot of thoughtful and influential people. Free web-site content diffuses and broadens the field. But thoughtful and influential people are not going anywhere. Their appetite for the kind of content TNR, NR, The Atlantic, Commentary and others have generated will persist. I think we can be optimistic about the demand side of the “struggling to figure out the world” equation. Supply will follow, we just don’t yet quite know how or from whence it will follow.
– Chris Nathan